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NOTE TO THE R EADER

THIS BOOK recounts what happened at Memorial Medical


Center during and after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and
follows events through the aftermath of the crisis, when medi-
cal professionals were arrested and accused of having hastened the
deaths of their patients. Many people held a piece of this story, and
I conducted more than five hundred interviews with hundreds of
them: doctors, nurses, staff members, hospital executives, pa-
tients, family members, government officials, ethicists, attorneys,
researchers, and others. I was not at the hospital to witness the
events. I began researching them in February 2007 and wrote an
account of them in 2009, copublished on the investigative news
site ProPublica and in the New York Times Magazine: “The Deadly
Choices at Memorial.”
Because memories often fade and change, source materials dat-
ing from the time of the disaster and its immediate aftermath were
particularly valuable, including photographs, videotapes, ­e-mails,
notes, diaries, Internet postings, articles, and the transcripts of in-
terviews by other reporters or investigators. The narrative was
also informed by weather reports, architectural floor plans, elec-
trical diagrams, and reports prepared by plaintiff and defense ex-

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xxvi  note to the reader
perts in the course of civil litigation; and I visited the hospital and
other sites depicted in the book.
Dialogue rendered in quotation marks is reproduced exactly as
it was recalled in interviews, or is taken directly from transcripts
and other primary sources. If one person recounted an important
conversation, I generally attempted to contact all participants, but
some declined to speak, and at times memories were at odds. The
main text and Notes highlight areas of significant dispute and in-
dicate the sources of quotes when they did not derive from inter-
views with me. Typographical mistakes are preserved in quoted
e-­mails to give the reader a sense of the urgency involved in their
production.
This book relates the thoughts, impressions, and opinions of
the people in it. Because this is perhaps the most fraught aspect
of narrative journalism, attributed thoughts or feelings reflect
those that a person either shared in an interview, wrote down in
notes, a diary, or a manuscript, or, less commonly, expressed to
others whom I interviewed. By contrast, I have tried to make my
own interpretations and insights distinct. These events were ap-
proached without conflicts of interest or conscious biases. All er-
rors are mine.

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PART 1
DEADLY CHOICES

Blindness was spreading, not like a sudden


tide flooding everything and carrying all
before it, but like an insidious infiltration
of a thousand and one turbulent rivulets
which, having slowly drenched the earth,
suddenly submerge it completely.
—­José Saramago, Blindness

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PROLOGUE

AT LAST through the broken windows, the pulse of helicopter


rotors and airboat propellers set the summer morning air throb-
bing with the promise of rescue. Floodwaters unleashed by Hur-
ricane Katrina had marooned hundreds of people at the hospital,
where they had now spent four days. Doctors and nurses milled
in the foul-­smelling second-­floor lobby. Since the storm, they had
barely slept, surviving on catnaps, bottled water, and rumors.
Before them lay a dozen or so mostly elderly patients on soiled,
sweat-­soaked stretchers.
In preparation for evacuation, these men and women had been
lifted by their hospital sheets, carried down flights of stairs from
their rooms, and placed in a corner near an ATM and a planter
with wilting greenery. Now staff and volunteers—­mostly chil-
dren and spouses of medical workers who had sought shelter at the
hospital—­hunched over the infirm, dispensing sips of water and
fanning the miasma with bits of cardboard.
Supply cartons, used gloves, and empty packaging littered
the floor. The languishing patients were receiving little medi-
cal care, and their skin felt hot to the touch. Some had the rapid,
thready pulse of dehydration. Others had blood pressures so low
their pulses weren’t palpable, their breathing the only evidence of

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4  sheri fink
life. Hand-­scrawled evacuation priority tags were taped to their
gowns or cots. The tags indicated that doctors had decided that
these sickest individuals in the hospital were to be evacuated last.
Among them was a divorced mother of four with a failing
liver who was engaged to be remarried; a retired church janitor
and father of six who had absorbed the impact of a car; a WYES
public television volunteer with mesothelioma, whose name had
recently disappeared from screen credits; a World War II “Rosie
Riveter” who had trouble speaking because of a stroke; and an
ailing matriarch with long, braided hair, “Ma’Dear,” renowned
for her cooking and the strict but loving way she raised twelve
children, multiple grandchildren, and the nonrelatives she took
into her home.
In the early afternoon a doctor, John Thiele, stood regarding
them. Thiele had taken responsibility for a unit of twenty-­four pa-
tients after Katrina struck on Monday, but by this day, Thursday,
the last of them were gone, presumably on their way to safety. Two
had died before they were rescued, and their bodies lay a few steps
down the hallway in the hospital chapel, now a makeshift morgue.
Thiele specialized in critical care and diseases of the lungs.
A stocky man with a round face and belly, and skinny legs re-
vealed beneath his shorts, friends called him Johnny, and when he
smiled, his eyes crinkled nearly shut. He was a native New Or-
leanian, married at twenty, with three children. He golfed and
watched televised sports. He liked to smoke a good cigar while
listening to Elvis.
Like many of the hospital staff around him, his association
with what was now Memorial Medical Center stretched back
decades. He had rotated at the hospital as a Louisiana State Uni-
versity medical student in 1977. A classmate would later say that
Johnny Thiele had turned into the sort of doctor they all wished
to be: kind, gentle, and understanding, perhaps all the more so
for having struggled over the years with alcohol and his moods.
When Dr. Thiele passed a female nurse, he would greet her by
name with a pat on the back and sometimes call her “kiddo.”

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five days at memorial  5
Thiele had pursued part of his training at the big public Char-
ity Hospital, one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation, where
he learned, when several paramedics burst into the emergency
room in close succession, to attend to the most critical patients
first. It was strange to see the sickest here at Memorial prioritized
last for rescue. At a meeting Thiele had not attended, a small group
of doctors had made this decision without consulting patients or
their families, hoping to ensure that those with a greater chance
of long-­term survival were saved. The doctors at Memorial had
drilled for disasters, but for scenarios like a sarin gas attack, where
multiple pretend patients arrived at the hospital at once. Not in
all his years of practice had Thiele drilled for the loss of backup
power, running water, and transportation. Life was about learn-
ing to solve problems by experience. If he had a flat tire, he’d later
say, he knew how to fix it. If somebody had a pulmonary embo-
lism, he knew how to treat it. There was little in his personal his-
tory or education that had prepared him for what he was seeing
and doing now. He had no repertoire for this.
He had arrived here on Sunday. He brought along a friend
who was recovering from pneumonia and was too weak to com-
ply with the mayor’s mandatory evacuation order for the city,
which had exempted hospitals. Early Monday, Thiele awoke to
shouts and felt his fourth-­story corner office swaying. Its floor-­
to-­ceiling windows, thick as a thumb, moved in and out with the
wind gusts, admitting the near-­horizontal rain. He and his col-
leagues lifted computers away and sopped up water with sheets
and gowns from patient exam rooms, wringing out the cloth over
garbage cans.
The hurricane cut off city power. The hospital’s backup gen-
erators did not support air-­conditioning, and the temperature
climbed. The well-­insulated hospital turned dank and humid;
Thiele noticed water dripping down its walls. On Tuesday, the
floodwaters rose.
Early Wednesday morning, Memorial’s generators failed,
throwing the hospital into darkness and cutting off power to the

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6  sheri fink
machines that supported patients’ lives. Volunteers helped heft
patients to staging areas for rescue, but helicopters arrived irregu-
larly. That afternoon, Thiele sat on the emergency room ramp for
a cigar break with an internist, Dr. John Kokemor, who told him
doctors were being requested to leave last. When Thiele asked
why, he later recalled, his friend brought an index finger to the
crook of his opposite elbow and pantomimed giving an injection.
Thiele caught his drift.
“Man, I hope we don’t come to that,” Thiele said. Kokemor
would later say he never made the gesture, that he had spent nearly
all his time outside the building loading hundreds of mostly able-­
bodied evacuees onto boats, which floated them over a dozen
blocks of flooded streets to where they could wade to dry ground.
He said he was no longer caring for patients and too busy to worry
about what was going on inside the hospital.
Wednesday night, Thiele heard gunshots outside the hospital.
He was sure people were trying to kill each other. “The enemy”
lurked as near as a credit union building across the street. Thiele
thought the hospital would be overtaken, that those inside it had
no good way to defend themselves. He lost his footing in an inky
stairwell and nearly pitched down the concrete steps before catch-
ing himself. Panicked and convinced he would die, he reached his
family by cell phone to say good-­bye.
Thiele felt abandoned. You pay your taxes and you assume the
government will take care of you in a disaster, he thought. He also
wondered why Tenet, the giant Texas-­based hospital chain that
owned Memorial, had not yet sent any means of rescue.
Finally, on Thursday morning, the company dispatched leased
helicopters, while other aircraft from the Coast Guard, Air Force,
and Navy hovered overhead awaiting a turn to perch on Memo-
rial’s helipad. Airboats came and went with the earsplitting drone
of airplane engines.
The pilots would not allow pets on board the aircraft and wa-
tercraft, creating stressful choices for the staff members who had
brought them to the hospital for the storm. A young internist held

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five days at memorial  7
a Siamese cat as Thiele felt for its breastbone and ribs and conjured
up the anatomy he had learned in a college dissection class. He
aimed the syringe full of potassium chloride at the cat’s heart. The
animal wriggled free of the doctor’s hands and swiped and tore
Thiele’s sweat-­soaked scrub shirt. Its whitish fur stuck to him.
They caught the animal and tried again to euthanize it, working
in a hallway perhaps twenty feet away from the patients in the
second-­floor lobby. It was craziness.
A tearful doctor came to Thiele with news she had been of-
fered a spot on a boat with her beautiful twenty-­pound sheltie.
She had quickly trained it to lie in a duffel bag. Several of the
doctor’s human companions were insisting they would not leave
without her. The doctor had been sick to her stomach and contin-
uously afraid. She wanted to go while she had this chance, but she
felt guilty about abandoning her colleagues and the remaining pa-
tients. “Don’t cry, just go,” Thiele said. “An animal’s like a child.”
He reassured her: “We gonna get by without you. I promise you.”
Thiele walked back and forth through the second-­floor lobby
multiple times as he journeyed between the hospital and his medi-
cal office. As the hours passed, the volunteers fanning the patients
on their stretchers were shooed downstairs to join an evacuation
line snaking through the emergency room.
Thiele knew nothing about the dozen or so patients who re-
mained, but they made an impression on him. Before the storm,
the poor souls would have had a chance. Now, after days in the in-
ferno with little to no medications or fluids, they had deteriorated.
The airboats outside made it too loud for Thiele to use a stetho-
scope. He didn’t see any medical records, didn’t feel he needed
them to tell him that these patients were moribund. He watched
a doctor he didn’t know direct their care, a short woman with
auburn hair. He would later learn her name: Dr. Anna Pou, a head
and neck surgeon.
Pou was among the few doctors still caring for patients inside
the stifling hospital. Some physicians had left; those who hadn’t
were, for the most part, no longer practicing medicine—­they

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8  sheri fink
were carrying patients or deciding which people to load onto
boats and helicopters outside, where it was somewhat cooler. But
Pou looked to Thiele like a female Lone Ranger. After four nights
of little sleep, she remained determined to tend to the worst-­off.
Later, he would remember her saying that the patients before
them would not be moved from the hospital. He did not know
who had decided that.
Hospital CEO L. René Goux had told Thiele that everyone
had to be out by nightfall. A nursing director, Susan Mulder-
ick, the designated disaster manager, had given Thiele the same
message. The two leaders later said they had meant to focus their
exhausted colleagues on the evacuation, but the comments left
Thiele wondering what would become of these patients when ev-
eryone else left.
He also wondered about the remaining pets, which he’d heard
would be released from their kennels to fend for themselves. They
were hungry. And Thiele was sure that another kind of “ani-
mal” was poised to rampage through the hospital looking for
drugs they were addicted to and craved. He later recalled won-
dering at the time: “What would they do, these crazy black peo-
ple who think they’ve been oppressed for all these years by white
people . . . God knows what these crazy people outside are going
to do to these poor patients who are dying. They can dismember
them, they can rape them, they can torture them.”
What did the patients’ family members want Thiele to do?
There was no one left to ask; they had all been made to leave, told
their loved ones were on their way to rescue.
The first thing, he thought, was the Golden Rule, do unto
others as you would have them do unto to you. Thiele was Catho-
lic and had been influenced by a Jesuit priest, Father Harry Tomp-
son, a mentor who had taught him how to live and treat people.
Thiele had also adopted a motto he had learned in medical school:
“Heal Frequently, Cure Sometimes, Comfort Always.” It seemed
obvious what he had to do, robbed of control over almost every-
thing except the ability to offer comfort.

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five days at memorial  9
This would be no ordinary comfort, not the palliative care he
had learned about in a weeklong course that certified him to teach
how to relieve symptoms in patients who prioritized this goal of
treatment above all others.
There were syringes and morphine and nurses in this make-
shift unit in the second-­floor lobby. An intensive care nurse he
had known for years, Cheri Landry, the “Queen of the Night
Shift”—­a short, broad-­faced woman of Cajun extraction who had
been born at the hospital—­had, he believed, brought medications
down from the ICU. Thiele knew why these medications were
here. He agreed with what was happening. Others didn’t. The
young internist who had helped him euthanize the cat refused to
take part. He told her not to worry. He and others would take
care of it.
In the days since the storm, New Orleans had become an ir-
rational and uncivil environment. It seemed to Thiele the laws
of man and the normal standards of medicine no longer applied.
He had no time to provide what he considered appropriate end-­
of-­life care. He accepted the premise that the patients could not
be moved and the staff had to go. He could not justify hanging a
morphine drip and praying it didn’t run out after everyone left and
before the patient died, following an interval of acute suffering.
He could rationalize what he was about to do as merely abbreviat-
ing a normal process of comfort care—­cutting corners—­but he
knew that it was technically a crime. It didn’t occur to him then to
stay with the patients until they died naturally. That would have
meant, he later said he believed, risking his life.
He offered his assistance to Dr. Pou, but at first she refused.
She tried repeatedly to convince him to leave the area. “I want to
be here,” he insisted, and stayed.
With some of the doctors and nurses who remained, Thiele
discussed what the doses should be. To his mind, they needed to
inject enough medicine to ensure the patients died before every-
one else left the hospital. He would push 10 mg of morphine and
5 mg of the fast-­acting sedative drug Versed and go up from there

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10  sheri fink
as needed. Versed carried a “black box” warning from the FDA,
the most serious type, stating that the drug could cause breathing
to cease and should only be given in settings where patients were
monitored and their doctors were prepared to resuscitate them.
That was not the case here. Most of these patients had Do Not
Resuscitate orders.
It took time to mix the drugs, start IVs, and prepare the sy-
ringes. He looked at the patients. They seemed lifeless apart
from their breathing—­some hyperventilating, some gasping ir-
regularly. Not one spoke. One was moaning, delirious, but when
someone asked what was wrong, she did not respond.
He took charge of four patients lined up on the side of the
lobby closest to the windows: three elderly white women and a
heavyset black man.
It had come to this. Dr. Thiele’s mind began to form a ques-
tion, perhaps in the faint awareness that there might be alterna-
tives they had not considered when they set this course. Perhaps
he realized at the moment of action that what seemed right didn’t
feel quite right; that a gulf existed between ending a life in theory
and in practice.
He turned to the person beside him, the nurse manager of the
ICUs who also served as the head of the hospital’s bioethics com-
mittee. Karen Wynn was versed in adjudicating the most difficult
questions of treatment at the end of life. She, too, had worked at
the hospital for decades. There was no better human being than
Karen. At this most desperate moment, he trusted her with his
question.
“Can we do this?” he would later remember asking her. “Do
we really have to do this?”

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